SOURCE: Scharnhorst, Gary. “Whatever Happened to Bret Harte?” In American Realism and the Canon, edited by Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst, pp. 201-11. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994.

In the following essay, Scharnhorst explores the reasons for Harte's virtual disappearance from modern critical studies.

In the midst of a literary reformation whose most radical protestants decry the very notion of a canon, something rather curious has occurred: Bret Harte's works have disappeared from the textual landscape like books banned in Boston. Neither the Heath nor the Harper—the most inclusive and unabashedly decentered of the new college anthologies of American literature—contains a single word by Harte, and he receives scant attention in the new Columbia Literary History of the United States. The Signet paperback edition of The Outcasts of Poker Flat and Other Tales, the collection of Harte's stories best-suited for classroom adoption, has recently lapsed from...